7.19.2005

Media Analysis on website

This website combines a few different types of sub-media within the medium of a website, or more specifically a blog.

Media Content: digitized images of postacards (USPS-style) mailed to the admin of PostSecret. Each postcard is created using different media, including, but not limited to magazine images, photographs, printed text, markers, and the like.

Media Grammar: Presented as a series of images in a blog format, sometimes with a comment or two, more often not.

Media Environment: You read people's secrets in the comfort of your own home (or anywhere else you choose to read them), on a computer screen. The environment has effect of separating you from the subject matter, yet you can often still relate to it.

Technical Constraints: The postcards are often created from textured media that you can not experience fully through the digitized image posted. Older ones are often removed because of space constraints.

Institutional Practices: Not so much a practice as a lack of one: the admin does not provide archives of the postcards. This forces the reader to visit every week, for fear of missing one, and also creates a dynamic aspect of constant changing, and if you want to see the card in the future, you must save it for yourself in a different location.

Cultural Circulation: As more people discover this, it has grown. A band has featured enlarged versions of some postcards in their music video, bringing the project to an entirely separate set of media.